


And The Dead Don't Sleep

by AnonymousPumpkin



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Depression, Dissociation, Eating Disorders, Gen, Literally everything I write for Vinh is so depressing wth, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect), Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, The Normandy Crew are mentioned but not present, Vinh Shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-16 20:33:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9288530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousPumpkin/pseuds/AnonymousPumpkin
Summary: "I'll rest when I'm dead," she said once. But no matter how hard she tries, Vinh can't seem to die.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I had a panic attack writing this. Fun times. Maybe writing a heavy and existential fic in the middle of a scary and existential part of my life wasn't the best idea.

Vinh wasn’t aboard the Normandy when the Collectors took the crew. Sometimes, though, she still sees it in her dreams. When she isn’t running through a world of darkness and blur, she stands at the CIC and watches them all get dragged away. Some kick and scream, and some are limp with fear. Others scream for her, reach for her, beg her to save them. Sometimes she can only watch, mute and horrified, and other times she screams as well, and tries to save them, but her body won’t move and the Collectors ignore her. In the back of her mind, someone is laughing at her, mocking her and daring her to save them.

Their voices echo in her dreams, joining the chorus of ghosts that haunt her. She remembers them not in death (well…not often in death), but as they had been in life. She replays overheard conversations about home and hope and family, and she hears the wonder and determination in their voice. They had all believed in her. They’d put their faith in her. They’d all been willing to die…but none of them had quite believed that she would let them. She wonders if they died still believing in her…if every person had died believing they would be the last. She knew it had been a suicide mission, but she wonders if everyone truly believed she would be able to save them.

She _should_ have been able to save them.

In the end, she saves nine people.

Nine people out of forty-one.

She recognizes the shellshocked look on their faces, and wishes she could do something, _anything_ , to help them. But she recognizes the look too well. She knows nothing will ever soothe their fear, or their shock, or their guilt. All she can do is silently join them, sharing moments of quiet despair in between the moments when she must be strong.

The decision to wait haunts her. Almost as soon as she made it, she regretted it. Though she couldn’t have known the full extent of the damage, she knew logically that every moment they waited was another life lost. But they weren’t ready. They were nowhere near ready to take on the Collectors. Part of her wanted to charge in guns blazing anyway. She’s Commander goddamn Shepard, for fuck’s sake. Even _death_ couldn’t stop her. But she’d made a promise to herself that this _wouldn’t_ be a suicide mission. So she bided her time, bolstering their defenses and making sure everyone’s affairs were in order…just in case.

She tells herself that saving a few people is better than saving none at all.

That helps about as much as she would have expected.

Two crews lost because of her failure. She burns every name into her mind until she can recite them in her sleep…and she does. The months she spends under house arrest are good for her, in a way, and terrible for her, in a way. She spends nights poring over the file for every crew member she lost. She relives their deaths, even the ones she didn’t witness. She writes letters to families, lovers, friends. She sees them in her dreams and every night she makes a promise—an empty promise, she knows—that they will be the last.

The grief is so raw and overwhelming that the only way she can fight it is emptying herself completely. If she allows herself to feel anything, she will feel _everything_ , and she’ll drown in it. She spends hours and hours lying prone, the datapad propped up against her knee or against the wall. She lets the days pass by without eating, letting the dust and sorrow settle over her. When her guards insist, she drinks flavored water and throws the rations they give her down the sink.

Eventually, it starts to work. The sorrow settles so deeply on her weakened body that it ceased to feel like anything at all. Pain is dulled and fades as her mind becomes too starved to process it. She is too exhausted for grief, too distant for pain. A few times, Vega manages to get her to eat actual meals, and while she appreciates his looking out for her, she doesn’t appreciate the aftermath. The bursts of energy that comes with meals sends her spiraling back into her guilt and anger. When she has the presence of mind and the energy to do so, her mind betrays her, and the ghosts come back.

This isn’t new for her. She went through a nearly identical process after Akuze, though with a touch less house arrest and a touch more rehabilitation center. Only her son’s birth had kept her from completely losing herself. Now, though, she has nothing. She sends her family letters, and she sends Thane letters, and she can see Altair for short amounts of time, but for the most part, she is alone. She hasn’t seen her son since before she went after Saren, and she hasn’t seen her love since she was arrested.

She can still tell you every person who died on Akuze, and she can list every person they left behind, and she can still recall their faces. Her first therapist had been disturbed when she’d shown him her sketchbook and had found every inch of every page decorated with ghosts. She’d always been good with faces.

She’s not unused to being a survivor. Vinh’s entire life has been defined by a series of life-or-death scenarios that she pulls out of through sheer luck. She’s hailed as being stronger, better, and smarter than other soldiers, but she never feels that way. She’s only ever felt very lucky…or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it. Her entire life has been her charging blindly forward, often screaming and brandishing a shotgun, and the universe deciding to guide her feet away from every pothole and obstacle before her. No matter how many groups of husks she throws herself into, she walks out again, bloodied and beaten but alive.

She was four when she lost her family the first time. It was luck and stupidity that left her and her sister safe when the floods started. Vinh had wanted to go outside and see the sky. She wanted to see if she could see the stars through the clouds. They’d climbed onto the roof and then up higher onto the trees, and then even higher up onto the silo. Lien knew their mother would be furious, and she’d insisted they stay up there until she fell asleep, and then climb back down and sneak in. Being four and six, of course, they’d fallen asleep up there. When the storm came, the trees fell and they were stranded. That saved their lives.

During one of their grief therapy sessions, Vinh had admitted that she’d never felt lucky that she’d lived. That’d made Lien cry, and the therapist insisted on transferring Vinh to individual grief counseling to avoid upsetting them both further. In private, she asked Vinh why she would say that. Vinh, all of seven years old, had shrugged and said that it didn’t make sense for _her_ to be alive when her mother was the only one who knew how to make Lien laugh. She’d ask the therapist why she was alive when it didn’t make sense. She’d never gotten an answer.

She never stopped asking why. _Why me?_ When she enlisted in the Alliance, she’d thought perhaps that was why. She had lived so she could save others, so she could defend and represent humanity in the galaxy. Admittedly, she was following a dream of hers. She’d always wanted to travel the stars and see the universe and learn as much as she could, and being in the Alliance soothed both restless voices within her. She felt like she was doing something useful. Maybe it didn’t matter that she couldn’t make Lien laugh. Maybe she could make her _proud_.

Eventually, Vinh learned to cope, and to quiet the ghosts.

And then Akuze happened. She receives some kind of medal, she thinks, just for _surviving_ , and she becomes the venerated and respected picture of a perfect Alliance soldier. She is _celebrated_ , put up on some kind of pedestal as if a few well-placed pieces of debris and a high school track sprinting record weren’t the only things that had kept her alive. She becomes known as a survivor who gets the job done and who does her job well, but very few people actually look at her and realize she is barely holding herself together.

What little peace Vinh had managed to make with her own survival was completely shattered. Good soldier, good _people_ , _better_ people than her, were killed without discrimination. People with families and dreams and potential beyond anything she could ever accomplish. She was just… _there_ , and yet she was still _here_.

That was when her habits became more…permanent. She’d never really eaten much, but when the grief became too much, she found that she physically _couldn’t_. She needed her body and her mind to be equally hollow, and she needed her mind to be as hazy and unfocused as it could or else she would drown. She learned quickly that was a sure way to lose her job, and she learned how to satisfy that urge in other ways. It was explained as being residual survivor’s guilt, an inability to accept her own life’s worth, and a manifestation of her need for control in a universe which she had always felt had her at its cold mercy.  Knowing why didn’t make it any easier.

She admits to a random stranger in a drunken haze that she doesn’t understand why she’s alive. She tells him that she doesn’t even feel alive anymore, that maybe she drowned with her family and her body just forgot to stop. They protect her that night, fending off unwanted conversation and handsy bar patrons, and when she admits she was her own ride home, they offer her theirs. She spent nearly three months crashing on their couch, passing the days starving and drunk. When she finally picks herself up and goes back home, she’s two months pregnant. She never hears from them again.

She stabilized somewhat after she had Altair. The moment he was born, her entire world seemed to shift, and in those moments when she held him, she thought that maybe survival wasn’t the worst thing that could’ve happened to her. He was so perfect, so beautiful and helpless, and she loved him with every shattered piece of her heart.

 _Why me?_ she wondered as she held him. Why was she blessed with this gift, this beautiful shining light?

Her need for control and purpose spilled out of her personal life and into her professional. What began as a genuine love for humanity and desire to protect is quickly corrupted and becomes a consuming _need_ to be useful, to be productive, to be _worthy_ of the second chances she’s been given. She needs to fill the holes in the universe left by those she’s lost, those she’s failed. She needs to be the soldier, the mother, the brother, the lover that all of them could have been. She needs to be someone Altair can look up, someone he can be proud of.

Anderson knew, and has always known, and he is always very careful around her. He’s the only person she trusts to look after her in a professional setting, and he has been from the moment she enlisted. He always seems to recognize when her dedication to her job becomes obsessive and self-destructive, and he knows how to pull her back and calm her down and put her in a more constructive mindset. He can’t help her when she’s on the battlefield, when she feels the urge to test the limits of her luck and throws herself in the middle of the fight with no shields and nothing but her wits to protect her. But he helps her when she’s out of her armor, firmly guiding her away from thoughts that will get her killed.

By the time she died (the first time), Vinh hadn’t managed to get a full night’s sleep, or to hear certain names or sounds without flinching, in years. Even the euphoria after Saren’s defeat and the comfort of being surrounded by such loyal and loving company couldn’t fully fill the holes in her.

She never gets the time to fully process losing the first Normandy. While it’s burning, all she can focus on is getting everyone out. She can’t lose another crew. She _can’t_. She’s pushing people out, she’s screaming at Joker. And then she’s drowning, thrown into space. The circular poetry of her dying of asphyxiation is something that won’t come to her until much later. In the moment all she thought was _oh god no no no not now please I don’t want to die please I’m scared not like this._

And then there is nothing.

Of course, that didn’t last. She was _Commander Shepard_. She didn’t _get_ to die. Against nature and technology and morality, she is dragged screaming from death’s jaws. As soon as she woke up, she hit the ground running, and in only a few months’ time she was charging at the Collectors in an empty ship, the weight of another lost crew on her shoulders. She punches every Collector she gets close enough to, and the halls of the ship echo with savage, ragged screams. It doesn’t bring anyone back, but it makes her feel marginally better, just long enough for her to turn and find something else to punch.

It’s not until she returns, branded a criminal, that she has any time to reflect on her losses, and by that point, she has _two_ crews to mourn.

It’s two years too late, but Vinh writes letters to the families of everyone who died on the first Normandy. She memorizes their names, reads their personnel files, and she sees them in her dreams. She would like to visit their graves, but she never has the time. Someone sends her pictures, though, and she gives what she can to their families and to their names. It is too little too late, but she does what she can to honor them.

She feels anger, cold and bitter, towards Cerberus, and towards Miranda for cheating her out of the death she doesn’t even pretend not to believe she deserves. She could only survive so much, but it seemed she wasn’t even allowed to die when it _was_ her time. She feels selfishly slighted, as if they’d stolen something she cherished.

Those thoughts only make her feel worse. What low places she’s sunk to, hating the dead. Although…she doesn’t hate Miranda. Quite the opposite, actually. Vinh loved Miranda, as fiercely as she’d loved any other member of her crew, and given the chance, she would have laid down her life for her and the chance to see her grow and shine. But of course, that’s not what happened. That’s _never_ what happens.

Miranda died, and all Vinh could do was watch.

 _Why me?_ Why did Vinh survive and Miranda hadn’t? Miranda had so much more _life_ in her, she had a chance to right her wrongs and do what she knew was right. Shepard was already tired and angry and lost, and the best thing she could do for the galaxy was die. But Miranda was brilliant and witty and charismatic, and she could’ve changed the world, given the chance. Instead she was dead.

Vinh arranges for Miranda’s grave to be placed with Vinh’s family on Earth, and she pays for everything. She doesn’t get to go to the funeral, but a few weeks into her arrest, her guard smuggles her a letter from Miranda’s sister, thanking her for what she’d done. She doesn’t bother writing back, and to do so would be dishonest. It’s pure guilt that inspires her actions, and doing it hadn’t made Miranda’s death right.

She still wonders what the point is. She wonders if she’s worth it. She sits in her bed, reading Kelly Chambers’s file one more time, trying to think about the way she’d sounded when she laughed instead of the pitch of her screams as she’d died. She wonders if Kelly had seen her running, trying to free her. Selfishly, she hopes she didn’t.

She’s hospitalized after a month of house arrest. They find her collapsed in the bathroom, gaunt and pale and still. And once again, Vinh is placed in the uncomfortable position of being surrounded by people trying to _save_ her life. She wants to scream at them to leave her be, to take out the needles and the fluids and to dismiss the doctors.

“I don’t see the point of this,” she admits sardonically to her sister during one of the few calls she’s allowed to make. “I mean, why bother?” She gestures to the IV’s and tubes pumping nutrients into her starved body. “We all know I’m not going to die. We’re probably going to find out I have some kind of weird disorder where I don’t actually _need_ food to survive.” She stops just before joking that Cerberus made her immortal this time. She has _some_ common sense, after all.

Lien doesn’t think it’s terribly funny anyway. The next time she visits, she takes Vinh aside and hugs her for nearly ten straight minutes. She makes her promise to say anything like that in front of Altair, or in front of their mothers.

“They’ve been worried sick about you, Vinh,” she says. Her voice is deadly serious, as always. If there is one thing they share, it is an inappropriate chronic sobriety. “You _died_ , Vinh. You don’t…I know you don’t think it’s a good thing that you’re back, but… _they_ do. _We_ do.”

They stay as long as they can, and come back as often as they can. It’s not bad, when they’re around. Altair grew so much in just two years, and he sits by her and tells her everything he possibly can in the time he’s given. It doesn’t feel like such a betrayal to eat with her mothers, not when the sight of it makes their eyes light up. She wishes that Thane were here to meet them too, but she doubts she’ll be able to get ahold of him. It was hard enough convincing them to let her family in. She takes lots of pictures and videos and promises herself that one day, she’ll show them to him.

When they leave, though…when they leave, the ghosts return. The empty apartment is full of negative space and shadow, and the dead take residence in the corners of every room. They don’t blame her, they don’t hate her. They just watch, solemn and sad from within her mind.

Vinh doesn’t sleep. She hasn’t, for a long time now. Not since she came back. She just lays awake, listing names. Some recent. Some ancient. When she does manage to drift off (she can’t describe it as sleep; it’s restless and terrifying and dark), she is standing on the CIC, or she is running on Akuze, or she’s climbing the tree trying to reach the top of the silo. Sometimes the Collectors notice her. Sometimes the thresher maws turn her way. Sometimes she slips as she reaches up to grab the next branch. But she always wakes up the next morning, empty and alone.

She knows when the Reapers come. She’s not sure how, but she wakes up one morning and she just _knows_. There’s an itch in her bones and at the back of her skull, a droning that grows louder and louder until she sees the clouds part and the world explodes in a deep, emotionless scream. She does the best she can to shove the terror down, and perhaps she does too good a job. She looks out the window and watches the city burn, and she feels next to nothing. Even anger is slow to come as her sluggish heart tries to remember how to feel things again. She comes off as arrogant in her “I told you so,” and angry in her acceptance of command of the Normandy. As strange as it is to think, she doesn’t _want_ the Normandy back. It’s her home and her heart and her entire life, but she can’t walk the halls without seeing the ghosts of the people she’d failed.

It’s much more of a military vessel now, that much is plain. Civilian luxuries have been done away with, though cutting edge technology remains. It feels like a punch in the gut, as if they are stripping away the last remaining reminders of the people she’s lost. She misses the decorations and the softness, the way the interior lent itself to lounging, laughing conversation. But in a way, the clutter and chaos are perfect for her state of mind, heightening and accentuating her anxiety.

She stops the first time she goes for the elevator and sees the long list of names. She knows every one of them intimately now, from the first she’d lost to the last. From Kaidan to Kelly, every failure immortalized in metal. She wonders who put them up.

There’s another woman at Kelly’s station. She’s sweet and pretty. She looks nothing like Kelly and she sounds nothing like Kelly and she certainly _acts_ nothing like Kelly, but Vinh still flinches every time she turns and sees someone standing at her elbow. It’s not like there aren’t ghosts at _every_ station, but…Vinh didn’t watch _everyone_ on the Normandy die.

She spends the first night aboard the Normandy curled in a ball against the side of the bed. Her eyes hurt from staring the datapad in the dark, but turning on the lights feels overwhelming.

The casualty numbers from Earth are already staggering. There isn’t enough intel for her to memorize names, and she would probably spend the entire war just reading them once if she tried to do that. She can’t memorize their names, but she can still acknowledge their losses. When she’s finished reading the casualty reports, incomplete though they are, she goes back to the personnel files, and she reads those until EDI, none too gently, suggests that she engage in something less…morbid.

She lies awake, watching the light from her empty aquarium dance across the backs of the immobile starships. There’s a model Normandy, the SR-1, as sleek and beautiful as the first day Vinh laid eyes on her. If she stares long enough, everything else fades away and she can almost pretend she’s right back there again. It’s not far enough back to chase all her ghosts away, but it’s far enough. She’s not lying when she says she considers those brief months aboard the first Normandy as “the good old days.” Maybe it’s a testament to how grim her life is that she remembers that time among relative strangers to be the brightest and happiest months of her life.

The next morning, she pulls herself out of her bed and she takes the elevator down and she stares for a moment. She turns away, and she hates herself for it. She throws herself forward, into council and into battle and into war. And she keeps coming back. She throws herself into groups of husks, of brutes, of Cerberus agents, shields depleted, daring them to be the one to finally fell the might Commander Shepard.

She doesn’t sleep. Her dreams don’t feel like rest. They feel like she’s back on the Collector ship, or back in the void, or back on Akuze. She feels like she is walking the fine line between life and death, chasing with her arms outstretched after the ones who leap over it and leave her behind. Kaidan. Miranda. Mordin. Her mother. Thane. She searches for them, screaming until she is hoarse, charging through the fire. The only person who ever looks back is that boy, that scared little boy who died while she watched. He, too, fades when she gets too close.

She knows it’s fruitless, but she tries to find out who he was anyway.

_Why me?_

She’s never stopped wondering. It was her own idiocy that saved her life as a child. Why her and not her mother? Why not her older brother? Why did she survive, instead of someone who would’ve been able to take care of Lien the way she’d needed? Dumb luck saved her on Akuze. Why not her commander? Why not Cas? Why not Fetch? Why did _she_ survive, instead of someone who had a spouse and children waiting for them, or someone who was so stunningly brilliant they could’ve changed the world?

Why her instead of that boy? He was so young, so scared…he could have grown up and been something amazing. He could have been the most profound artist the galaxy had ever seen. He could have been the most brilliant biotechnician in human history. He could have been the most ordinary and mundane person on the planet, and still have been happy, and she still would trade her life for his in an instant. He’d had a _future_. They’d _all_ had had futures, and hopes, and dreams, and the potential to _be_.

Vinh lays in her bed for hours. She never answers that question. In the morning, she gets up and she puts on her uniform and she takes the elevator down. She stares at the names for a few minutes (more names, every mission added more names) and she turns away. The ghosts scream at her, a morbid chorus behind her eyes.

She should be better than this. She should be stronger. That’s what they would have wanted. That’s what they would have expected. They would want her to mourn them and release them and _live_. But she can’t. She _can’t_. Doubt and guilt and fear consume her and she stumbles forward because she doesn’t know what else to do. They’d all died believing in her, in what she could do, in what she _would_ do.

They’d died for her, and she’d failed them.

With any luck, she won’t live long enough to regret it.

Vinh gets up. She puts on her uniform. She throws herself into war.

Eventually, she doesn’t come back.

**Author's Note:**

> Haha guess who found out the hard way what happens when you do all the loyalty missions at the very last minute
> 
>  
> 
> also sorry vinh, but you chose control, so TECHNICALLY you're STILL not dead!


End file.
